Editors\u27 Note

In this issue of Educational Considerations, we are pleased to offer readers extended, in-depth discussions of two critical issues for educational leaders and policymakers: Cost-effective factors that have the potential to improve student achievement and effective preparation programs for education leaders

Policy-based access control from numerical evidence

Increasingly, access to resources needs to be regulated or informed by considerations such as risk, cost, and reputation. We therefore propose a framework for policy languages, based on semi-rings, that aggregate quantitative evidence to support decision-making in access control systems. As aggregation operators \addition", \worst case", and \best case" over non- negative reals are both relevant in practice and amenable to analysis, we study an instance, Peal, of our framework in that setting. Peal is a stand-alone policy language but can also be integrated with existing policy languages. Peal policies can be synthesized into logical formulae that no longer make reference to quantities but capture all policy behavior. Satis ability checking of such formulae can be used to validate and analyze policies in this new evidence-based approach. We discuss a number of applications, including vacuity, redundancy, change-impact and safety analysis. The synthesis algorithm requires a form of subset enumeration, for which we develop bespoke algorithms and demonstrate experimentally that our algorithms work better than generic state exploration methods. We also sketch how our approach extends from non-negative reals to other semi-rings and even to rings such as the real numbers

Introduction to the Special Issue

We are pleased to share with you this special issue revisiting the research on the relationship between class size and student achievement, along with its implications for education policymakers and practitioners. For over half a century, researchers have struggled to identify those variables that contribute in significant ways to students’ academic success, and the resulting, voluminous literature is rife with contradictory results. At the same time, the positive results of class size research, which is part of the body of “production function” analysis, has received broad acceptance by policymakers, parents, and practitioners who believe “smaller is better.

Foreword

This issue, guest-edited by Teresa Northern Miller, represents the third and final issue in a trilogy exploring the reform of educational leadership preparation programs in the United States